Accessibility in social media
Funka held a seminar and presented a study on the accessibility in social media. The study, consisting of surveys and user testing, is funded by the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency. It has been supplemented with survey questions to Swedish authorities and municipalities on how they use social media.
More and more agencies and municipalities use social media in their contact with citizens. It is easy to go along - "everyone is there so we need to latch on to." In Funka’s questionnaire, 62% of the authorities answer that they use social media. 26% cannot with certainty say that the information published on social media is also accessible on their websites. The survey shows that social media have major and minor accessibility problems for many different groups of users. Registering is consistently impossible or very difficult for people surfing with assistive technology. For persons unused to technology or with cognitive disabilities the interfaces often appear muddled and inconsistent. And Swedish language support is missing in several places, which place demands on the user's language skills.
Trust is perhaps the most important problem from an accessibility perspective, how you are perceived by the users. In some cases, it does not really seem deliberate. 68% of those who responded to our survey have not even evaluated its presence in social media. If anything, that worries me, says Susanna Laurin at Funka.
Funding: The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency
Period: 2010-2011
Funka’s report on accessibility in social media (in Swedish, pdf 544 kb), opens in new window
Presentations from the seminar ”Accessibility in social media”
Introduction and background by Susanna Laurin (in Swedish, power-point 376 kb), opens in new window
Survey of social media (in Swedish, power-point 1,33 MB), opens in new window